How you can help to get cabinet devolution minutes released

! This post hasn't been updated in over a year. A lot can change in a year including my opinion and the amount of naughty words I use. There's a good chance that there's something in what's written below that someone will find objectionable. That's fine, if I tried to please everybody all of the time then I'd be a Lib Dem (remember them?) and I'm certainly not one of those. The point is, I'm not the kind of person to try and alter history in case I said something in the past that someone can use against me in the future but just remember that the person I was then isn't the person I am now nor the person I'll be in a year's time.

The SNP have asked the British government for the minutes of the 1997 cabinet meeting on devolution in which it was decided that the Scots and Welsh would be allowed self government whilst England would not.

This important document has been requested a number of times under the Freedom of Information Act and blocked every time. The Information Commissioner has ruled that release of the minutes is in the public interest and ordered their release but they were blocked by the Attorney General, Dominic Grieve.

What are these traitors so desperate to hide?

Vetoing FOI requests requires the unanimous agreement of the cabinet. When Jack Straw and Dominic Grieve vetoed their release in 2009 and 2012, these people conspired to keep the minutes secret:

Jack Straw

Dominic Grieve

The Rt Hon Gordon Brown MP

The Rt Hon. David Cameron MP

The Rt Hon Harriet Harman QC MP

The Rt Hon. Nick Clegg MP

The Rt Hon The Lord Mandelson PC

The Rt Hon. William Hague MP

The Rt Hon Alistair Darling MP

The Rt Hon. George Osborne MP

The Rt Hon David Miliband MP

The Rt Hon. Kenneth Clarke QC MP

The Rt Hon Jack Straw MP

The Rt Hon. Theresa May MP

The Rt Hon Alan Johnson MP

The Rt Hon. Dr Liam Fox MP

The Rt Hon Hilary Benn MP

The Rt Hon. Philip Hammond MP

The Rt Hon Douglas Alexander MP

The Rt Hon. Dr Vince Cable MP

The Rt Hon John Denham MP

The Rt Hon. Iain Duncan Smith MP

The Rt Hon Ed Balls MP

The Rt Hon. Chris Huhne MP

The Rt Hon Ed Miliband MP

The Rt Hon. Edward Davey MP

The Rt Hon Andy Burnham MP

The Rt Hon. Andrew Lansley CBE MP

The Rt Hon Shaun Woodward MP

The Rt Hon. Michael Gove MP

The Rt Hon The Baroness Royall of Blaisdon PC

The Rt Hon. Eric Pickles MP

The Rt Hon Tessa Jowell MP

The Rt Hon. Philip Hammond MP

The Rt Hon Jim Murphy MP

The Rt Hon. Justine Greening MP

The Rt Hon Yvette Cooper MP

The Rt Hon. Caroline Spelman MP

The Rt Hon Liam Byrne MP

The Rt Hon. Andrew Mitchell MP

The Rt Hon Peter Hain MP

The Rt Hon. Owen Paterson MP

The Rt Hon Bob Ainsworth MP

The Rt Hon. Danny Alexander MP

The Rt Hon The Lord Adonis MP

The Rt Hon. Michael Moore MP

The Rt Hon Ben Bradshaw MP

The Rt Hon. Cheryl Gillan MP

The Rt Hon Nick Brown MP

The Rt Hon. Jeremy Hunt MP

The Rt Hon The Lord Malloch-Brown KCMG PC

The Rt Hon. David Laws MP

The Rt Hon John Healey MP

The Rt Hon. Danny Alexander MP

The Rt Hon Pat McFadden MP

The Rt Hon. The Lord Strathclyde PC

The Rt Hon The Lord Drayson PC

The Rt Hon. The Baroness Warsi PC

The Rt Hon Jim Knight MP

The Rt Hon. Francis Maude MP

The Rt Hon The Baroness Scotland of Asthal PC QC

The Rt Hon. Oliver Letwin MP

The Rt Hon Dawn Primarolo MP

The Rt Hon. David Willetts MP

The Rt Hon Rosie Winterton MP

The Rt Hon. Sir George Young Bt MP

The Rt Hon Sadiq Khan MP

The Rt Hon. Patrick McLoughlin MP

The Rt Hon. Dominic Grieve QC MP

The minutes are really of more interest to the English than the Scots as they got what they wanted and we got shafted so we shouldn’t be leaving it to the Scots to get these minutes into the public domain. If every English person interested in seeing what decisions were made at the cabinet meeting that have resulted in over 15 years of institutional discrimination against the English made a Freedom of Information request for the minute, it would be extremely damaging to the British government if they tried to block their release to hundreds or thousands of people.

Under the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act, I am requesting a copy of the minutes of the 1997 Cabinet meetings on devolution. I am also requesting a copy of the Terms of Reference for the cabinet committee headed by Lord Irvine that the minutes relate to and any legal or departmental advice provided to the cabinet in relation to these meetings.

From our experiences from devolution, i think it cost far too much and you english should do something else. You are going to lose us, so why not pro actively dump the Welsh and the Irish and make Westminster, England only?

You dont want something new, when it will be easier to fix what
you’ve got?

You say you think but your post is evidence to the contrary. Devolution costs the little nations of the ‘union’ nothing and when we in England win for ourselves the devolution our British masters have given you, at our expense, your devolution will cost us nothing, which, as far as we are concerned, is a ‘win win situation’. We’d love to lose you, and we clamour for the chance to do so, but the Brits who rob us to pay you won’t give it to us. We don’t wish to fix what we’ve got; we want to get rid of it and get in something new of our own.

The Welsh and the Irish aren’t as much of a problem as the Scotch. They’re the buggers we really need to get out of Westminster. The others we can drop when we have nothing more important to take care of.

[…] is another reason why Wonko’s Freedom of Information Request to get the minutes of the 1997 meeting on devolution needs to succeed, which e-Petition to the government will hopefully help get them […]